by Sandra Fees
I spume water into the birdbath
by Jennifer Stewart Miller
by Louisa Muniz
Summer and peach trees everywhere.
Fruit falling into the lap of the earth.
The crows in the yard forage for food.
At the birdbath I find a sparrow on its back.
I watch for its rise and fall
but its legs and feet are frozen. Stiff in repose.
Is this a sign, omen, or message
for something I need to let go?
A breath away, the silent-standing maple flutters.
Doesn’t everything begin & end in stillness?
I call out to my husband in the house,
there’s a dead bird out here.
He yells back,
leave it alone.
I don’t listen.
Instead, I take care to scoop it
from the basin, lay it gently
in a plastic bag.
Dispose of it in the trash.
Later, I’ll be sorry I didn’t take
the time to bury it properly,
maybe even pray for it to soar high
into the spirit of vaulted sky.
But for now I am reminded of
all that is sacred & unpretentious
all that is wondrous & small.
____________________________________________________________
Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared Palette Poetry, SWWIM, PANK Magazine, One Art, and elsewhere. She won the Sheila-Na-Gig Spring Contest. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, After Heavy Rains, was released in December, 2020. Her latest chapbook, The Body is No More Than a Greening Thing, is forthcoming.
by Betsy Mars
A woman stares in a mirror, beholds herself. We in the audience pause to take her in, too. Her brow furrows. Eyes critical slits, we follow her gaze up and down her body. Opening a drawer she pulls out a fettling knife, gets to work, carving slabs, trimming. Stepping back to appraise each new line, each curve, the ratio of waist to hip, breasts uplifted with the edge of her potter’s rib. Now to the face where a straight needle is needed. Her eyes examine her eyes: she shifts them a little further apart on either side of her newly upturned nose, admires the perfect symmetry. A pile of cast-off clay lies at her feet.
The lights come up—
popcorn crumbs
dimple my thighs.
____________________________________________________________
Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has recently appeared or is upcoming in ONE ART, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Rat’s Ass Review, among others. In 2021, Betsy’s poems were nominated for Best of the Net as well as the Pushcart prize. Her photos have appeared in RATTLE’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Redheaded Stepchild, and Spank the Carp. Her chapbook, In the Muddle of the Night, was co-authored with Alan Walowitz.
by Nicole Zdeb
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
Just escaped the cosmic dustbin,
March’s swirling floodwaters, and
you’re a master of beginnings,
the bright idea, strong coffee.
You hit your head more than once
against the deliberate consideration
of others. You like to fall in love.
You like to fall.
You build landings for the sky.
Subject to high fevers,
clairvoyance and weird dreams.
You want seven
women on seven seas
to bear your silvery seed.
You speak in puffs of smoke,
your mouth a popular sculpture.
A more desperate man would reach for his hat.
You look like you’re swallowing clouds.
____________________________________________________________
Nicole Zdeb is a writer, visual artist, and astrologer based in Oregon. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and studied Translation Theory at CUNY and the University of Paris. After starting as a classroom teacher, she embarked on a dual career in educational publishing and astrology. She has designed learning games, an after-school arts curriculum, and consulted for NBC’s Education Nation. In 2021, Zdeb completed a Practitioner’s Level Certificate from the School of Traditional Astrology in London and launched Angela Alston Astrology, a consulting practice focused on horary astrology and creative coaching. She currently resides in Portland, OR, with her husband, writer Jamie Cooper. She is a poetry editor at Airlie Press. Her book, The End of Welcome, is forthcoming in 2025.
by Holly Joy Wertman
I found God at the Broadway Junction stop
headed home from a week of reluctant days
dripping R&B jams from a karaoke speaker
amid the heavy stirred exhaust so invasive
it fermented water holy in each of my pores.
I picked up religion as I waited for paradise
standing clear of the closing doors, o please,
bless me with cranked up freon conditioning
gusts that I will start complaining about soon.
Just the way Lord separated land from water
and It! Was! Good! for a minute—until man
decided to create swimming pools because
we missed how it once felt to maybe drown.
My ears are melting from being pounded
by bootleg bass beat "Jesus died for my sins"
but I guess not for long because the next J
is 17 minutes away and the End of Days
fire and brimstone temperature forecasts
flash on screen behind me, but I don’t turn
because knowing makes everything worse.
There is not a soul who could convince me
it didn't go just like this: Eve ate that apple
and someone spun her around a few times,
sent her train back to its home station, until
she found herself in a far more terrible place
than she was before—still Eden, now aware.
____________________________________________________________
Holly Joy Wertman is the Director of a guaranteed income and peer support program for parents living in NYC homeless shelters. A recent graduate of Columbia Mailman, her work has been published across research, nonprofit, and journalistic platforms. She also has an upcoming essay in the Rocky Horror Picture Show anthology to be published by the Feminist Press.
by Sarah Kersey
To say love is
a hard thing.
The tongue
has to overcome
the teeth.
A lack of faith.
Saveme I plead.
I am shipwreck,
flood,
mouth open,
bottom sinking.
Every wave-tossed tear
comes. Every
bit of heat
comes.
Blood rushes in.
I clamor through the fog
of cologne for her.
____________________________________________________________
Sarah Kersey (she/they) is a poet and x-ray technologist living in Boston, MA. Her debut chapbook, Residence Time, is published by Newfound. They have received support from Tin House Workshop. Sarah's work has appeared in The Rumpus, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Account Magazine, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere.
by Tyler Hurula
I am an only child.
My mother does not stay
long enough to feast on my father’s
fists. When I look in the mirror, I bare
my mother’s teeth. My eyes, twins
glowing green ivy, barren of poison
roots. You will not find me in a sea of people
pleasers—I am raising a forest of chosen
family trees. My mother unfurls,
unlearns the language of obedience.
She conspires with other disentangled
mothers, and I am raised by soft-handed
palm readers who un-stain me worrier,
weave me warrier as they trace the threads
of my skin. My sisters are imaginary.
When we play tea party no one slices
their finger. We dance loose-limbed
and unscarred. No one gets called
into the elementary school principal’s
office to talk to a nice lady asking
about the origin of bruises. I am not afraid
of voices wearing thunder capes.
When my imaginary sister sends me
an imaginary text about an imaginary
baby, I am happy—not scared
of who they will take after.
____________________________________________________________
Tyler Hurula (she/they) is the pinkest poet in Denver, Colorado. She strives to be the most queer and polyamorous person they can be. Author of Love Me Louder (Querencia Press) and Too Pretty for Plain Coffee (Wayfarer Books). She has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for the Write Bloody 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize Contest. Find her on Instagram @theprettypinkpoet.
by Laurie Kuntz
For all the springs
it bloomed, my favorite flower
went unnamed.
Growing in the garden of strangers,
I called the unknown clusters,
purple ladle, lavender lattice, horns of azul—
All inventions in my floral eye.
The nameless possess a perennial persistence,
an uncalled promise.
Not knowing if he would survive,
in a world he entered too soon,
my son went unnamed for weeks.
The nameless are constant companions,
secure in the wisdom of all that is possible,
which brings a calling, such as
the periwinkled foxglove
and Noah, my son—
Both named for the persistence of their bloom.
____________________________________________________________
Laurie Kuntz has published six poetry books. Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, she won one in 2024. She has also been nominated twice for Best of the Net. She's published widely in magazines such at Sheila-Na-Gig, Gyroscope Review, One Art, Anti Heroin Chic, and others. Her themes come from working with Vietnamese refugees, living in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil, raising a husband and son, and loving her 12 cats and two dogs. See lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1.
by Michele Battiste
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
by WIFE X
Do you ever have a day
when nothing feels good?
You amble around in dirty PJs,
take bites of foods
from your crisper, your cabinet.
Everything is mealy.
For months, you’ve played Solitaire
in bed each night, buying into
that wretched myth
you could ever “win.”
The man who told you he wanted you
back, then two days later announced
he’d slept with another, loved her,
preferred her, said, “Now, listen”
(as if he was some authority
in honesty and truth). “I know you
are still in love with me,”
and damned
if that fucking man wasn’t true.
Like a goddamn carnival game,
he aimed that sharp dart and got you, didn’t he?
Other things not exceptional: paying taxes,
the exorbitant price of eggs, the terrifying
news headlines, the joint pain in your
almost-fifty-year-old fingers and ankles.
You’re a thin muslin bag.
Even your anger isn’t exceptional anymore—
isn’t that the saddest thing? Ahh, the rage of youth!
Without the sharp blade of love
to machete through the crap of the world,
you’re a bit lost, aren’t you?
It was nice for a time to feel infused
with a lover’s adoration. Like lidocaine,
a sedative forest. Now you eat oatmeal
for breakfast and sometimes for lunch,
cold and unsweetened, straight out
of the leftovers container in the fridge
with your fingers.
You do Kegels every few weeks
when you lay on the electrolysis table,
and the old lady zaps the hairs
relentlessly sprouting on your upper lip.
For the past year, you tried to practice gratitude.
But some days the dump truck
of self-pity is just too strong.
If this was a snowstorm, a white-out blur,
you’d know what to do. Put on your flashers,
squint your eyes, blast some punk or something
with a beat, and you’d ride it out, wouldn’t you?
Even when nothing can be made out,
when you can barely see an inch past your nose,
you’d drive right through.
____________________________________________________________
"All is fair in love and war," the saying goes. WIFE X disagrees. Pat Benatar sang, "Love is a battlefield." And with the statistics about intimate partner violence, household labor, and more—WIFE X agrees with Benatar, which is why she is using this nom de guerre as she writes from her home somewhere on the East Coast.
by Angie Hexum
Still looking within, we are quiet, separate,
as we make our way into the sunshine.
Woolly bees carom among the blue blossoms of ceanothus
and the breeze carries the scent of pine.
I take a seat on the long wooden bench,
lay out my snacks on the sun-warmed slats.
One by one, I eat the cashews, corn chips, cubes of cheddar,
chewing slowly as we were encouraged to do.
Then, the orange. Wedging my thumbnail
between fruit and rind, the dimpled skin releases
with a muffled crackle. I had not known until this moment
letting go has its own particular sound.
Chunks of peel piled beside me, my fingers sticky,
the jeweled flesh shines through rifts in the pale membrane—
the bare, sweet heart of it, a little battered, and if anything
more delectable for the deliberate work of freeing it.
____________________________________________________________
Angie Hexum grew up in Nebraska. After graduating from Swarthmore College, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she pursued a career in speech-language pathology and raised two children. Of late, she has returned to writing, which was her original passion. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Caesura, Gyroscope Review, and Quartet. In addition to poetry, she finds joy in time outdoors and in singing with a women’s chorus.
by Mary Lou Buschi
There was a year my mother couldn’t leave her bed.
Something about her nerves.
Then the story about almost being kidnapped.
She turned away from the details as one turns
from a needle sliding through skin to enter a vein.
My grandmother made her cry often, yet we’d return,
on The Canarsie Line, 14 stops into Bushwick,
crowded with people daydreaming as they swayed or lurched,
under the wobbling fans, fat art made from spray cans.
I’d crane my neck as far as I could feel the muggy breeze
against my face, inhaling lithium grease, timing the arrival
out of the darkness into flickering lights.
The last time, because there is always a last,
we rode that train, the doors to the exit were locked.
A group of us pushed through the turnstile into a trap.
My mother grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go.
When she was dying, she said, you know your father
apologized. Then she quickly went back under the wave
of the in-between confusing me with her sister,
forgetting my name, my face until the next time
she came up for air, she said, my mother told me
I deserved it—losing my son.
Tending to a body dying is a secret. An unspoken pact,
never disagree with the dying. Tell others it was peaceful,
without incident. No one wants to hear the body swells;
organs strain for oxygen. No one needs to know you placed
your cheek on her hot skin stretched to almost bursting,
while lamplight broke over her and drank her in.
____________________________________________________________
Mary Lou Buschi authored three poetry collections. Her third book, Blue Physics (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024) was a finalist for Contemporary Poetry in The International Book Awards and Distinguished Favorite: Independent Press Awards. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Glacier, Jet Fuel Review, Hunger Mountain, and many others.
by Jane Poirier Hart
Moths batter the screen door, their
fluttering counterpoint to my medley
of kitchen plops & plinks. I think
of the TV commercial I keep seeing
where a grade-school band blows a sloppy
version of Also Sprach Zarathustra and a kid
on one end of the semi-circle swings his feet,
offbeat, to the wobbly strains of Strauss.
Both Strauss and Nietzsche were responding
to the looming European crisis of their time:
the rise of science over the reign of religion.
I distrust religion, am weak in the sciences—
When I turn to set the dinner table, I see a moth
caught in amber of softened butter, body
stilled. Wings imprinting Land O’Lakes
leave an indigo image as detailed, as a da Vinci,
as unlikely as god painted on a peeling ceiling.
____________________________________________________________
Jane Poirier Hart holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BMus in Composition from Berklee College of Music. Her awards include a Residency at The Frost Place, a Fellowship at the Writers’ Room of Boston, and nominations to The Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in print and online journals, including Los Angeles Review, The Southern Poetry Review, The Worcester Review, The Ocean State Review, and Lily Poetry Review.
by Andy Young
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIMEvery Day's archives!
____________________________________________________________
A couple faces one another
as if in conversation.
This is how they were found.
Now they lie in vitrines
like fish in facing tanks.
Could not speak if they
could speak. They were
dressed for their death passage,
not to be specimens in glass.
Her bare breasts shine
like doorknobs. Linen
wraps for the poor, gold
masks for the rich, eyes
so lifelike excavators
gasped when they brushed
the dust away. The revolution
left no money for excavation;
thousands of mummies
still lie in burrowed tunnels
under the houses and roads.
The dead do not ponder
revolutions, but they like
to sometimes be considered.
Small mourning statues
were found in the tombs,
meant to eternally weep
at their side. One man
is a merchant with a Horus crown.
Tolemic, someone says.
Our son points to another’s
thickly outlined eyes.
He is awake, he says,
but does not answer.
A stone girl, five years old,
too poor for a golden crown;
my daughter, also five,
asks if they’re the same
size—yes, almost exactly.
For a while, this is how
our children will think of death:
gilded bodies that keep their shape,
wide-eyed and adored.
____________________________________________________________
Andy Young's second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published in October 2024 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. See andyyoung.org.
by Nicole Burdick
By the time I got to her breasts
she was thinking about doughnuts.
I was giving value to the underside
of her left nipple with light stippling
when hunger overtook her,
at least that’s what she said
during the break, casual in her robe,
gobbling the cookies Jen made.
Clark crosshatched the same area
with soft lead, his point dulling
from each mark he left to darken her.
Jen transformed the breasts
into two rounded squares—
very Botero, I thought, but didn’t say.
Her jealousy evoked a three-dimensionality
that made the tits look like they had a life beyond
the chest. I could do this all day, Paul thought
to himself as he used his finger to smudge
a well just where the breast and rib met.
As the model wiped a crumb from her lip,
Ivan admitted he’d been on her thighs
and a data-mining solution for work,
hence the tentative strokes,
just before the timer rang.
And Karen pitched in about troubles
with the feet which most people
rarely bother to depict.
____________________________________________________________
Nicole Burdick is a Language Arts educator living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where ants now make their way into her poems more often. Despite the fact that people bless her for doing it, facilitating a thinking-is-fun environment about literature for teenagers is actually a dream job. She also paints abstract stories, collages broken tile, and cooks like she is from everywhere. Her poems can be found in Fence, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere.
by Barbara Schwartz
Your birth mother has the bluest eyes,
as if their color had made her cold, then slowly
numb with pleasure. Attendant to the holy
I offer her hot water, a blanket. Induced, she cries
a flock of spells to the quickening, hexes the squall
in the hallway. Unplugs herself from the wall.
An open gown frames her art. Tattooed thighs,
arms, neck: cupid’s arrowed heart, branching
snakes down her back. Her hair, blood-
red wine. She keeps you dream-feeding
until full. What can I feed you? My words
pour out like milk. She bites an ice cube, curses
the boiling moon. Alive & wailing you turn
from her breast. You breathe my breath.
____________________________________________________________
Barbara Schwartz is the author of three books of poetry: A chapbook, Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017); the collaborative collection, Nothing But Light (Circling Rivers, 2022); and the hybrid work, What Survives is the Fire, forthcoming from Alternating Current Press, which was a finalist for the Barrow Street Prize, Alice James Book Award, and a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. Barbara has chronic leukemia and works as an advocate for children with disabilities.
by Maya Bernstein
by VA Smith
After Jennifer Stewart Miller
Praise Poem About My Four-Year-Old Singing the Hallelujah Chorus from His
Car Seat
Pantoum: On Responding to Friends When They Ask About How My Son Is
“Doing” in State Prison
Villanelle: In the Same Week, Matt Is Ejected from His Varsity Soccer Game
for Sending an Opponent to the Hospital and His Ice Hockey Playoffs for
Gloves Off—Again
After Driving Eight Hours to Visit My Son, We Eat Vending Machine Crackers
in the Prison Visitors’ Room
Poem in Which I Narrate My Son’s Prison Phone Call When We Unpack Killers
of The Flower Moon, and I Am Happy All Afternoon
On My Curiosity About How the Mobius Loop of Multiple Addiction Disorders,
Childhood Sexual Abuse, and Mental Illness Braided This Life for My Son
How to Cut out Dinosaur Cookies with a Small Boy Who Insists on
Maintaining the Relative Approximate Size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s Hands to
Its Body
Sonnet: My Son’s Silence After the Parole Board Tells Him He Will Spend
Another Year in Prison
On Remembering the Sweet-Sour Scent of My Blond Toddler’s Body After
Waking from a Summer Nap
Poem in Which I Imagine What Happened: My Thirty-Something Son Fighting
Three Arresting Officers in His House While Knocking Over His Dogs’ Food
and Water Bowls
On Recalling My Newborn Son’s Hold on His Flannel Hospital Hat, as if
It Were Intentional, as if It Would Always Protect Him
____________________________________________________________
A frequent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, VA Smith’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies and in dozens of literary journals, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, and Third Wednesday. VA’s third book, Adaptations, will be published by Green Writers Press Fall of 2025, when she will serve as Poetry Editor of River Heron Review. Her bliss is writing, cooking, hiking and loving on friends and family.
by Patrice Boyer Claeys